Winning

“If at first you don’t succeed, skydiving is not for you.”

                           — Unknown  

I told the class to remember a time when they were winning: they won the race at the track meet, won the football game, got the part they wanted in the play, got the job or promotion, won the award, got the acknowledgment. When I asked them to tell their stories, they beamed and their faces glowed. On the white board, I started to list the emotions and feelings they remembered experiencing while winning:

Excited
Special
Lucky
Enthusiastic
Energized
Fun
Ecstatic
Happy
Confident
Powerful

They were thoughtful, tentative and reflective as they mentioned these feelings. Then I asked them to think about the challenges they faced, the breakdowns and roadblocks they were experiencing on their road to success.

They fired out the following in rapid succession, sometimes two or three speaking at once:

Depression
Fear
Why try
Worry
Helpless
Insecurity
Doubt
Trouble
Panic
Illness

It was amazing how quickly they came up with the second list. Those words and feelings just flowed out. I had to drag the other adjectives out of the group, we had to work really hard to come up with them—it was like pulling teeth! Unfortunately, most people are more comfortable with the negative voice. Their thoughts go there really easily. It’s more familiar. It’s like a rut in a road.

Use your affirmations to create a new rut—a rut of positive thinking! With practice, your thoughts will move to the positive automatically instead of to the negative. The negative voice will get quieter and quieter. You’ll find you go whole days without one thought of lack, limitation, or scarcity. Instead, abundance, prosperity, happiness and wealth will pervade your consciousness. You control your thoughts. Which rut in the road do you want to go down?

I’ve been practicing positive thinking for many years now. At first it was just a belief in the idea that positive thinking works. I didn’t monitor my thoughts to see what I was really thinking and I didn’t school myself to avoid negative input and actively seek positive input.

Later on, when I figured out that I was thinking all the time and that my thoughts directed my actions and my actions determined my results, I started actively practicing affirmations. But it was hit or miss for a long time; when some problem arose, I’d be controlled by that outer circumstance and go down the negative track again. As time went on, I became more consistent in my practice, got better results in my life, which encouraged me to even better consistency.

Now it is such an ingrained habit that I can’t NOT do my affirmations. I do them in the shower and while driving. When I snap my seat belt, the affirmations start running in my head and I start speaking them and feeling the good feelings associated with them.

But there is always more to learn. I listen to my clients and they come up with great affirmations all the time. Here are some by Janet Cargill of www.jcargillimage.com:

“My newsletters are ships I send out that will bring me the perfect number of client appointments to reach my financial goals. My readers are eager to open them when they arrive and eager to sign up for my fabulous offerings.”

and

“My appointment book is filled with the perfect number of qualified clients who are happy to pay me my perfect fee for my exceptional services.”

Love those! Thanks, Janet!

You control your thoughts. Which rut in the road do you want to go down?

Today’s Affirmation: Winning is my natural habit. I win everywhere I go.

Chellie Campbell, Financial Stress Reduction Expert, is the author of bestselling books The Wealthy Spirit, Zero to Zillionaire, and From Worry to Wealthy: A Woman’s Guide to Financial Success Without the Stress. She has been treating Money Disorders like Spending Bulimia and Income Anorexia in her Financial Stress Reduction® Workshops for over 25 years and is still speaking, writing, and teaching workshops—now as Zoom classes and The Wealthy Spirit Group on Facebook—with participants from all over the world. Website: www.chellie.com.